I mean the human tendency, not the EA tendency. TIME does it because it’s effective on their usual audience. EAs, evidently, have not risen above that.
If you think there’s an actual problem, I think the correct avenue is doing a real investigation and a real writeup. Trying to “steelman” a media version of it, that is going to be incredibly and deliberately warped, adversarially targeted at exploiting the audience’s underestimate of its warping by experienced adversaries, strikes me as a very wrong move. And it’s just legit hard to convey how very wrong of a move it is, if you’ve never been the subject of that kind of media misrepresentation in your personal direct experience, because you really do underestimate how bad it is until then. Aella did. I did.
Again, I would love for you to provide an example of something unreasonable the community has done in response to the TIME article. As far as I can tell, the community is trying to figure out what is going on, but people’s responses have generally been compassionate, open-minded, and reasonable.
If you think there’s an actual problem, I think the correct avenue is doing a real investigation and a real writeup.
This would not be a good use of my time, in part because others are much better positioned than I am to do this (and are). I also don’t think the bar for making the point in an EA Forum comment that “these kinds of claims are hard to substantiate with stories” should be that I myself have to go substantiate these claims with stories.
Notably: I think what happened to Aella is really bad. I don’t think we should steelman the claims made about Aella, which I have no reason to doubt are lies, and are cruel. I’m really sorry this happened; it shouldn’t have.
But I think steelmanning the TIME article is importantly different: among other things, this article is based on interviews with dozens of EAs who level critiques against a community of tens of thousands of people backed by billions of dollars in funding; this isn’t about a single individual being harassed and doxxed. And the article could be much more inflammatory than it is, I think. Many of the central claims in the article are true, and people don’t really seem to be contesting this; what seems to be under dispute is whether features of EA culture that are bad for women (uncontested) have led to higher rates of sexual misconduct against women (contested). This is a question the reporter gestures at herself (“The hard question for the Effective Altruism community is whether the case of the EA house in San Francisco is an isolated incident, with failures specific to the area and those involved, or whether it is an exemplar of a larger problem for the movement”). I hope the Community Health Team will get to the bottom of this.
I mean the human tendency, not the EA tendency. TIME does it because it’s effective on their usual audience. EAs, evidently, have not risen above that.
If you think there’s an actual problem, I think the correct avenue is doing a real investigation and a real writeup. Trying to “steelman” a media version of it, that is going to be incredibly and deliberately warped, adversarially targeted at exploiting the audience’s underestimate of its warping by experienced adversaries, strikes me as a very wrong move. And it’s just legit hard to convey how very wrong of a move it is, if you’ve never been the subject of that kind of media misrepresentation in your personal direct experience, because you really do underestimate how bad it is until then. Aella did. I did.
Again, I would love for you to provide an example of something unreasonable the community has done in response to the TIME article. As far as I can tell, the community is trying to figure out what is going on, but people’s responses have generally been compassionate, open-minded, and reasonable.
This would not be a good use of my time, in part because others are much better positioned than I am to do this (and are). I also don’t think the bar for making the point in an EA Forum comment that “these kinds of claims are hard to substantiate with stories” should be that I myself have to go substantiate these claims with stories.
Notably: I think what happened to Aella is really bad. I don’t think we should steelman the claims made about Aella, which I have no reason to doubt are lies, and are cruel. I’m really sorry this happened; it shouldn’t have.
But I think steelmanning the TIME article is importantly different: among other things, this article is based on interviews with dozens of EAs who level critiques against a community of tens of thousands of people backed by billions of dollars in funding; this isn’t about a single individual being harassed and doxxed. And the article could be much more inflammatory than it is, I think. Many of the central claims in the article are true, and people don’t really seem to be contesting this; what seems to be under dispute is whether features of EA culture that are bad for women (uncontested) have led to higher rates of sexual misconduct against women (contested). This is a question the reporter gestures at herself (“The hard question for the Effective Altruism community is whether the case of the EA house in San Francisco is an isolated incident, with failures specific to the area and those involved, or whether it is an exemplar of a larger problem for the movement”). I hope the Community Health Team will get to the bottom of this.